


Jamais Vu

by Nottherealdean



Series: Dean!clones [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Self-cest, dean!clones, puppet!deans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 21:17:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1702823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nottherealdean/pseuds/Nottherealdean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two of the Dean!clones, trying to deal with being stuck in Naomi's training room, and with each other/themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jamais Vu

**Author's Note:**

> Posted on tumblr on Feb. 23, 2014.

They were chipping away at the wall when it started.   
Dean had stabbed his knife into the wood and twisted it, prying another long splinter loose, and said, “This is like eating soup with a fork. You think we’ll get through in time?”   
The Dean working next to him didn’t look up. “In time for what?”  
“You know. If he comes back. If they send him back, or whatever.” Dean kind of wished he hadn’t started down this road, but it was so goddamn boring in here that picking at a scab started to sound entertaining.  
  
There was a hesitation in the other Dean’s gouging. “Lost the fight once already, didn’t we?” His voice was rough, and he was still staring at the wall. “You think we still got to go a round two?” He shifted his grip on his knife and dug it deeper into the wood with a grunt.   
Dean watched his face. He hadn’t actually seen what it looked like when he was fighting back pain like this before. He’d seen himself in the mirror wincing when he’d stitched himself up or pulled broken glass out of his scalp, and he knew the exhausted look of a bad night when he was shaving in the morning. But that flash of hurt, of betrayal like a dog that’s been kicked, and then the struggle to hide it and keep soldiering on, that was a new one.   
He wondered if he was this obvious to everyone. He hoped not. Maybe he had the advantage of feeling that expression from the inside first.   
They were both quiet after that.

The other Dean hissed in pain. Dean watched him pass his knife to his left hand and stretch out the fingers of his right. His palm was wet and shiny from a burst blister. Dean glanced at his own hand, and saw a pale bubble forming in the reddened line across his own palm. Seeing it there was disturbing, made him feel off-balance in a way that had nothing to do with dizziness.  
“Well, beating ourselves up won’t help,” he said, trying for jokey and mostly hitting lame. He could feel himself trying to hold the awkward smile a second too long.   
“Huh,” was all the other Dean said, but he turned and lowered himself to the floor, letting his back slump against the wall and the knife slip from his fingers.   
Dean followed suit, but instead of letting his head fall back and rest against the wall he stared down at his hands. There was a word, what was it? A french word, like déjà vu but not. He couldn’t think of it.   
He thought about the blood on the floor. He’d woken, no— resurrected— in a neat, even puddle, the kind that comes from two blows and then a stab wound to the chest. Some of the other pools he’d seen on the floor though, they were messy. The kind of messy you get when someone dies slow, like when the person has enough time to try to drag themselves away. He wondered which blood stains belonged to the Dean next to him. Probably one of the messy ones.  
Dean wished he hadn’t said anything, earlier. Hadn’t brought up the possibility that it wasn’t over. But now the silence was worse, and the scab was still there, waiting to be picked.   
“You know that word, the one that’s like the opposite of déjà vu?” he said, not really knowing where he was going with it, just where he really wanted to avoid.  
The other Dean opened his eyes and made what Dean recognized as his  _what?_  face, but didn’t turn his head.   
“Come on, I know you must know it too.” Dean wasn’t going to give up, not once he had hold of a subject that wouldn’t drop him in a pit of bad thoughts. Or put that look back on the other Dean’s face.   
“Where you see something and you know it, but it feels like you don’t? Like it’s unfamiliar?”  
Now the other Dean frowned, and Dean could tell he was actually thinking about it.   
“Do you remember when we learned it?” he asked, rolling his head against the wall so he was looking over at Dean for the first time.  
Encouraged, Dean pushed on.  
“No. Book, I guess. I don’t remember which. Not really something that comes up in conversation much. Except, uh, now.” He realized he was talking for the sake of talking and on the edge of babbling, but wasn’t sure how to pull back. Forget about all his other issues, another week of this and boredom alone would make him crack. Add in the mess that was inside his head before he ever saw this room, plus the… crap that had happened in it, and it really was a good thing he didn’t have a high opinion of himself. Losing his grip so badly in front of himself would be humiliating if he cared.   
“Kind of extraordinary circumstances here though, and. You know. Seems like a good word to have on hand. Given, given everything.” Dean started to feel embarrassed despite himself, and tried to squish it down. He’d disappointed himself before, and this really shouldn’t be any different.   
The other Dean was now focused intently on him, but wearing Dean’s  _what the hell?_  expression. Dean felt a tiny glimmer of pride twist through his embarrassment. It was a good expression.   
“Given…?” the other Dean echoed, with (again that twinge of pride) a mix of incredulousness and exasperation.   
Dean looked down at his hands and noticed a sliver in his thumb. “That I’m looking at my own body and it’s weird? I mean, it’s my own skin that I’ve worn every damn day of my life and on you it looks… weird. No offense, man. It’s just strange, is all.”  
Dean dug at the splinter with the tip of his knife, glancing quickly up at the other Dean and then away.   
“Huh. Yeah. Yeah, I get that.” He sounded a bit subdued now, or thoughtful. Dean wasn’t quite sure what he was thinking. That was a bizarre feeling, too.

Dean had almost finished worrying out— as slowly as he could— his sliver and was wondering what to do next when the other Dean spoke again.  
“Jamais vu.”  
“What?”  
“Jamais vu. That feeling like you’re seeing something for the first time but you’re not, you’ve seen it before. It’s called Jamais vu.”  
“Well, uh, thanks. For remembering.” Dean was about to decide that the other Dean was responsible for the next topic of conversation, when he started talking again.  
“All these  _us_ -es, like you said. I know I’ve seen the exact same thing in the mirror, but it’s different. Not like when Dad or Sam was possessed and it was something else wearing their faces, but like… it’s me behind the faces and it’s my face but both are— are not-me too.” There was a kind of urgency to his voice. Dean suspected he wasn’t the only one starting to feel the burn of cabin fever setting in.   
“Yeah,” Dean says quietly, noticing the other Dean was clenching and unclenching his blistered hand.  
“I know what’s in a mirror. You wouldn’t think a seeing bunch of reflections would be like this. There’s nothing  _different_  about you, it should feel like looking in a mirror.”   
Dean wasn’t sure he liked where the other Dean was taking this. It was starting to feel too complicated, too intense, like they were building up speed going down a hill and if they took a turn wrong they would crash.   
“Can’t see the back of your own neck in the mirror,” he said unthinkingly, trying to tap the breaks and lose some of the momentum.   
He realized it wasn’t going to work almost immediately. It wasn’t enough of a joke, it wasn’t funny enough to bring this back to somewhere light-hearted or trivial. It was just going to become serious to match the conversation.  
The other Dean looked startled, like maybe he knew they had been headed for a crash too and had expected the breaks to slip, but hadn’t counted on this curve in the road.   
Dean hesitated, mouth open to say something but with absolutely no idea what.  
The other Dean was looking at him. First in the eyes, but then his gaze dipped down to his mouth, further down to his hands— which Dean realized where still holding the knife tip to his thumb— and to his legs, one stretched out along the floor and one bent to prop his hands against.   
The other Dean caught himself (caught himself thinking about seeing the back of Dean’s neck, Dean knew, about seeing parts of his body that Dean had never seen, and wasn’t that a strangely intimate feeling, watching yourself have those kinds of thoughts?), and Dean got to see his  _wait, what— **what?**_  expression.   
“Did… Did you—” the other Dean started, and stumbled to a stop.  
“No, no no no, I, uh, I did not— That, uh, that was  _un_ intended,” Dean managed, still stuck on the thought of the other Dean  _checking him out_. “Not that that, uh, makes it less, you know. Weird. Or uh, kind of disturbing. But I guess your mind went to the gutter too, so— so this is not all on me.” Dean cursed himself for using  _that_  phrasing. “It’s your brain too,” he amended.   
“Wow,” said the other Dean. “Just, wow.”  
“In my defense,  _someone_  was going to bring up the ‘would it be sex or masturbation’ debate that always comes up in these clone— duplicate— _whatever_  the hell we are situations,” Dean tried. “That just, just took it to a, an awkwardly… non-hypothetical… place.”   
“… _Yeah_.” said the other Dean, letting out a deep breath. “No kidding. So, uh, that— that’s the best line you could come up with though? I mean, that’s pretty weak.” Now he was the one trying to joke his way into some semblance of control.  
Dean bolted for the refuge of sarcasm.   
“Oh, well excuse me for not having an engraved invitation saying ‘Please join me on a journey of self-discovery! May include autoeroticism!’ I’ll just go find a stationary store and get that ordered for you,” he said, knowing it wasn’t really going to save him.   
If sarcasm was a safe house, the walls were shaking and the roof was staving in already. He couldn’t stay there, so he might as well bite the bullet and see this through all the way, he decided. Try and finish what he’d started. Wouldn’t that be nice at least, to get to end something?   
He took his own deep breath and let it out.  
“The hell with it,” he muttered, then braced himself and stomped down hard on the gas pedal. “Ball’s in your court now buddy, you want to play, then play. You want to forget this ever happened, go ahead. It’s not like you can’t disappear into  _this_  crowd,” he added, almost aggressively, tipping his head toward the middle of the room and the hundreds of other Deans scattered across it.  
The other Dean— his other Dean— was silent, for so long Dean almost broke and looked away.  
Then, like he was dealing with something that might take his arm off if he touched it wrong, he reached out and put his hand on Dean’s cheek. The tips of his fingers were in his hair and his thumb lay along the top of his cheekbone, and the world was spinning and Dean was at the center and the edge of it at the same time, spinning into an orbit he didn’t know and it felt nice, nicer than Dean had felt in a long time, and he leaned, gingerly, into the touch.


End file.
